Merit's History

The NSFNET Backbone Project, 1987 - 1995

NSFNET: A Partnership for
High-Speed Networking

NSFNET: Coming Together

In 1987, scientists and researchers in some universities and research
centers already benefited from access to the first NSFNET, a 56 Kbps
backbone network linking five NSF-sponsored supercomputer centers and
the National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR. But by mid-
1987, traffic on that backbone had increased to the point of overload.
"People started to use it, and to like it, and to rely upon it. Their
research was already critically dependent on the network being
available," recalls Hans-Werner Braun, co-Principal Investigator of
the NSFNET project at Merit, Manager of Internet Engineering at Merit
from 1987-1991, and a principal designer/engineer of the routers used
on the initial 56K NSFNET backbone. In response to this need for
adequate network service, the National Science Foundation issued a
Project Solicitation for Management and Operation of the NSFNET
Backbone Network (NSF 87-37) on June 15, 1987. But who would be
served by the creation of an expanded national backbone network? And
who could put such a project together?

The NSFNET partnership team--Merit Network, Inc., IBM, MCI, the State
of Michigan, and the National Science Foundation--all brought unique
strengths and resources to the project. Each played an important role
in building the national backbone network service.

Hans-Werner Braun, co-Principal Investigator of the NSFNET
project at
Merit, and Manager of Internet Engineering at Merit from 1987-1991.

It may be difficult to believe today, but until recently--within the
last two decades--most scientists and researchers were able to carry
on their work without recourse to communicating via the marriage of
computer and telephone lines known as computer networking. What was
it like to be part of the research and education community in the
United States before the NSFNET? Scientists had to travel to reach
computing resources, from campus to campus or, in many cases, out of
the country. Most people didn't immediately share the results of
their research with colleagues outside of their own departments; they
would make a telephone call, mail a package, or arrange to meet in
person. Researchers and scientists had little or no experience with
sending a quick e-mail to notify a colleague of an interesting
article, or downloading a data file from a fellow professor in another
state, much less working simultaneously on a complex scientific
problem in real-time.

Campus networks were increasingly common at major research
universities, linking faculty with academic computing centers, but
these closed networks were often like islands to one another. This
began to change in the United States in the late sixties and early
seventies when various wide-area computer networks, or WANs, began
operation.

These WANs were primarily Federal research projects, the first of
which was the ARPANET in 1969. An outgrowth of the Department of
Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency, the ARPANET's packet-
switching scheme was meant to provide reliable communications in the
face of nuclear attack. By the early 1980s, other examples of Federal
networks included HEPnet and MFENET; however, the variety of different
protocols used could impede efficient communication. A small but
expanding part of the research and education community used e-mail via
UUCP or had access to some kind of message-forwarding system such as
BITNET, but access to Federal networking facilities such as the
ARPANET was usually limited to computer science departments or
restricted to researchers affiliated with laboratories funded by
various Federal agencies such as the Department of Defense, the
Department of Energy, and NASA.

While for these users, computer networking had become vital to their
daily activities, the average professor of English or economics was
unaware of the opportunities provided by information technology
applications. Ellen Hoffman, manager of the Network Information
Services Group at Merit from 1990 to 1993, reminds us:

"We forget that only a short time ago, the Internet was not a word
that rolled off anyone's tongue readily. It wasn't so long ago that
only the large research universities in the country were connected,
and within those universities often there was only one department
using the network. Even if there were 50 or 100 schools connected,
most people on those campuses had no idea that there was an Internet
connection to their campus."

Ellen Hoffman, a member of the original Merit team,
managed Merit's Network Information Services group from 1991 to 1993.

In the United States, "only about 50 percent of the large research
universities had ARPANET connections," estimates Mike Roberts, vice-
president of EDUCOM, the nonprofit consortium formed to promote
information technology applications in education.

Merit Network, Inc., the consortium of Michigan universities formed in
November of 1966, provided both campus and statewide networking
facilities. As a result, it knew, perhaps more than almost any other
educational institution, that the lack of a reliable national backbone
network was becoming a problem. By the late 1980s, approximately two-
thirds of the state universities in Michigan were connected to
MichNet, the statewide research and education network operated by
Merit. Running its own protocols for much of that time, the
connectivity to the outside world and to each other that MichNet
provided instilled a broader understanding among Michigan colleges of
the possibilities inherent in "internetworking" compared to most other
states. Having seen the value of providing networked communications
capabilities to members of the research and education community, Eric
Aupperle, president of Merit Network, saw an opportunity to take the
fruits of Merit's experience with MichNet beyond Michigan, in an
effort that would benefit not only the research and education
community but the nation as a whole.

"In an environment of resource constraints, the higher education
community has increased its investment in information technology to
enhance the effectiveness of research and education. More and more
of the important intellectual output of the higher education
community first exists in digitally encoded form. The higher
education community will benefit enormously from NSFNET and has a
major interest in its development and operation ... NSFNET should be
managed by an organization with strong academic roots so that it
will be able to anticipate the needs of the academic and research
community and build an organization that fits the environment in
which NSFNET will operate." (Merit Proposal, submitted to NSF 14
August 1987)

Eric Aupperle, head of the Merit Network since 1974, and
Senior Manager in the University of Michigan Information
Technology Division.

As part of the research and education community, Merit could provide
the foundation for a successful partnership between academia,
industry, and government to construct a national backbone network.

Merit provided the glue that held the project together. That glue was
composed of clear objectives, firm yet flexible management, superior
staff and the maintenance of close ties to the community served by the
NSFNET. The larger currents prompting the initiation of the NSFNET
backbone project included evolving Federal networking programs such as
the NSF-sponsored supercomputer centers and eventually the High
Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) Program; innovations
in computers and networking technology; and the desire to extend
networking throughout the research and education community. However,
according to Merit, the immediate, overriding objective was simple:
"generalized connectivity." Expanding the 1986 NSFNET, scaling it to
support the tremendous growth and interest by the community while
recognizing the community's increasing reliance on the network for
their day-to-day tasks was Merit's goal.

Another important function Merit provided was to mediate between
industry, government and the research and education community. While
the team partners exhibited an outstanding willingness to work
together, nonetheless "you're talking about very different cultures,"
notes Ellen Hoffman. By having a representative of academia be
responsible for the overall management of the project, the partnership
was able to avoid competition between industry partners, as well as
inspire greater confidence in the NSF and the research and education
community that the needs of the community would be well served:
"Merit was an excellent organization to have in that situation,
because it had the interests of the community at heart," says Jane
Caviness, Program Director for the NSFNET 1987-1990. According to
Priscilla Huston, Program Director for the NSFNET 1993-1995, "With the
NSFNET program, NSF funded and encouraged Merit, but Merit facilitated
the meetings, the open discussion, and got industry and others to be
proactive." But Merit couldn't do it alone.

Composed of representatives from Michigan universities, the Board of
Directors of Merit in 1987 was chaired by Doug Van Houweling, Vice-
Provost of Information Technology at the University of Michigan. While
working at Carnegie-Mellon University prior to arriving at the
University of Michigan, Van Houweling had discussed with IBM an
Ethernet-over-satellite communications system for higher education,
and suggested that IBM and Carnegie-Mellon make a proposal to the
National Science Foundation. Although that didn't happen, as a result
of this initial foray, Van Houweling "had been thinking about these
issues" when the NSF released its solicitation in 1987:

"In my new role as Chairman of the Board of Directors at Merit, I
went back to some of the same people at IBM and suggested this
project to them. It took several meetings to get the right group of
people in the room, but when we did, there was a lot of common
interest."

Van Houweling got in touch with Eric Aupperle and began a series of
meetings with potential industry partners to respond to the
solicitation.

Participants in some of these early meetings included Al Weis and
Barry Appelman from IBM Research; Bob Mazza, Walter Wiebe, and Rick
Boivie from IBM's Academic Information Systems division; and Eric
Aupperle and Hans-Werner Braun of Merit. Van Houweling explains the
thinking in this way: "We felt we needed a university organization,
and Merit certainly filled that role. We needed a software and
equipment provider, and IBM certainly fulfilled that role. But we
also needed a carrier for the communication," so Al Weis at IBM talked
to Dick Liebhaber, a vice-president at MCI, about the possibility of
MCI becoming a partner in the proposal.

According to those involved in these initial talks, there were many
reasons why IBM and MCI chose to become part of the Merit NSFNET
partnership, including the desire to be part of a high-profile, high
technology initiative benefiting the broader university community.
However, from a business perspective, becoming involved with the
NSFNET backbone service might provide opportunities for "technology
transfer." Broadly defined, technology transfer refers to the process
by which the products of government-funded research and development
move out of restricted use or research-only application to the private
sector.

Executives involved with academic computing within IBM, a world leader
in research and commercial products for systems and connectivity, were
interested in increased experience and involvement with the Internet
protocol TCP/IP, which by 1986 ran on a majority of campus networks.
By developing and implementing routers, adapters, network management
tools, and other equipment for the NSFNET backbone, IBM would be able
learn a great deal, as Al Weis explains:

"IBM was unable to interconnect its large mainframes and some of its
new workstations to all the research communities' networks and get
adequate performance, because those networks were TCP/IP networks.
By working on the NSFNET backbone service, we learned a lot about
TCP/IP and were able to address these needs common in many academic
environments."

MCI similarly grasped that data communications constituted an ever-
growing part of the economy, and hoped to develop a reputation for
data networking that would match its increasing clout in the
long-distance telephone business. The divestiture of AT&T in 1984 in
combination with continuing deregulation of the communications
industry had created new markets for all kinds of information
processing and telecommunications services. An increasing share of
corporate, university and government agency budgets was devoted to
telecommunications and data processing as the shift from a
manufacturing to a service economy took hold in the mid-1980s. With
over 34,000 global network miles and a coast-to-coast fiber optic
network in 1987, MCI had the ability to provide high-speed circuitry
for the NSFNET backbone service and, at the same time, learn about
data networking at T1 and greater speeds. Al Weis recalls Dick
Liebhaber, a senior vice-president at MCI involved with the NSFNET
partnership from the very beginning, saying that MCI had always been
known as a voice company, and if MCI was going to learn about data,
there was no better opportunity than this project. In this way, two
major U.S. corporations signed on to be part of the NSFNET backbone
service.

When successful, this "transfer" of technology and know-how is an
interactive process, with benefits flowing both ways: industry and
academia alike benefit from the increased knowledge and (in the case
of the NSFNET backbone) the resulting technology. On the NSFNET
project, technology transfer was successful at many levels.
Partnering with industry, according to Dale Johnson, the manager of
Merit's Network Operations Center (NOC), enabled Merit to "take
technology that existed in the labs, and had been proven in the labs,
and take procedures that had existed in the business sides of our
partners, and bring them into the Internet and make them part of
Internet culture." The NSFNET project helped to distribute technical
knowledge and skills among the Internet community, by training
personnel in Internet engineering, routing, and network management.
Finally, IBM and MCI also were able to gain valuable experience with
high-speed networking technology, which later helped them to create
commercial products and services based on that experience for the
emerging markets for Internet services and products stimulated by the
entire NSFNET program. According to Larry Bouman, MCI's Senior
Vice-President for Network Operations, "I don't think we'd be where we are
today if it weren't for the NSFNET project. Providing the circuitry
for the backbone service--and working with IBM and Merit to get it up
and running--gave us experience that led to a productive new focus for
the company."

Larry Bouman, MCI's Senior Vice-President for Network Operations.

In return, the NSFNET backbone service's corporate partners invested
far more time, money and resources than was required by their joint
study agreements with Merit. According to the proposal, IBM would
provide the computing systems for the network, including hardware and
software, and MCI would provide the underlying telecommunications
circuits for the NSFNET. However, by all accounts, there was never a
sense of meters ticking away for the partners' contributions, and in
fact IBM and MCI were generous with staff time and resources such as
financial support or equipment. Harvey Fraser, Project Manager at IBM
on-site at Merit for the NSFNET, puts it this way:

"The team worked well because we had resources, executive time, and
the desire to make it a success, as well as a lot of good faith and
good will. When issues came up, we evaluated them and, if we could,
provided whatever was needed. For example, when we needed more
routers, IBM got them for us. If we needed more lines for a test
network, MCI got them for us."

Mark Knopper, who succeeded Hans-Werner Braun as Manager of the
Internet Engineering Group at Merit in 1991, also remembers that the
behavior of NSFNET's industry partners went above and beyond the call
of duty:

"I'd go to meetings where the executives would say, 'Well, what are
the problems this week?' and 'What can we do to help?' I would be
sitting with vice-presidents and top managers of IBM and MCI and
they would say, 'What do you need? What can we do to fix things?'
Once they knew about a problem, they'd try to find a way to solve
it."

IBM and MCI realized that in working on a project like the NSFNET,
which would necessitate the use of uncertain and unproved technology
as well as the development of new operating and management systems, a
certain amount of risk was involved. The answer was not to simply
throw money at the project, but to make a number of different kinds of
resources--people, technology, funding--available as needed, according
to the judgment of each partner. This relationship of "good faith and
good will" among the partners was built upon the high caliber of
technical expertise going into the NSFNET project. IBM, MCI and Merit
assembled a top-notch team for the NSFNET backbone service: "The
quality of the technical contribution from people in Merit, IBM, MCI,
all three, was really spectacular," Doug Van Houweling remembers.

"IBM and MCI essentially donated a lot of resources and a lot
of energy for the NSFNET backbone service for the good of the
country. Working on a team like that, where people from IBM
were typically interested in developing products and moving
them into the marketplace, and MCI was typically interested
only in selling circuits, it was personally satisfying to see
people with different perspectives on what is important in
their organizations and their businesses, joining their
'vision' of a national network, so that it could happen. If
any one of the partners had balked, we probably couldn't have
done what we did." Elise Gerich, Associate Director for
National Networking, Manager of Internet Engineering, Merit
Network.

IBM and MCI also brought certain established ways of doing business,
"standard operating procedures" forged in the commercial realm that
created a strongly production-oriented mind-set for the team. Because
of this, according to Dale Johnson, the NSFNET project team "brought
applied commercial operating procedures to the Internet. All of this
was standard in the telephone companies and also at IBM."
Documentation, trouble tickets, escalation procedures, "follow-
through," and statistical reports were just some of the many
procedures that were adopted by the NSFNET project and modified to be
applicable to the Internet. Hans-Werner Braun explains what a
difference these procedures made to the thoroughness of project team
behavior:

"During one weekend all the routing daemons, all the code that
handles routing in the nodes, crashed. I called the person who
developed the routing software, Yakov Rekhter at IBM-Yorktown, at
home on a Sunday and had a fix for the problem in about two hours. I
think that's pretty amazing. Also, with MCI, if there was any
problem with the lines, they had a very aggressive escalation
procedure. Within only a few hours if the problem wasn't resolved it
was supposed to be on the desk of a vice-president. It made a huge
difference."

These innovations, which were standard in industry but new to academic
networking, would not have been worth much without high-level
corporate backing behind them, and according to everyone involved with
the NSFNET backbone service, IBM and MCI did indeed provide that
commitment. All of the partners--NSF, Merit, IBM, and MCI--
demonstrated an overwhelming desire to do whatever was needed to make
the NSFNET a success. However, the involvement and dedication of
technical and managerial personnel, at every level, at IBM and MCI was
among the most important factors in the project's success. With IBM,
MCI and Merit, then, industry and academia were well represented for
the NSFNET project. The final essential ingredient came from the
United States government.